Critical Miss

I always try to reserve my judgments for after a comic has had quite a few updates, since I feel bad for ripping apart what may simply be someone’s hobby. Most people don’t start out doing their comic “for profit”, or any site for that matter. Hell, that’s how I did my site, the ads are just there to cover hosting fees.

Critical follows Erin Stout, a professional video game critic, in her adventures… critiquing games. I know, what an innovative story. I must say that the writers were brilliant in pitching the comic to the Escapist instead of striking off on their own, after all the site is already filled to the brim with their target audience.

As video game critic comics go (and there’s a LOT of them out there), Critical isn’t bad. The comics are cynically funny, also known as “the best kind of humor”, and I have been genuinely entertained by them. This will sound ridiculously nitpick-y, but the only problem with them is that the first few comics lack a navigation bar, and it’s a pain in the ass to move around without one (There’s one now, but I’m leaving this in so that you don’t think that I was bought off).

Here’s the caveat, though. Like I’ve said in earlier reviews, comics have a nasty tendency to be spectacular at the start, then drift off into monotony or end completely. This is due to the fact that it’s really, REALLY hard to come up with something new and inventive once a week, much less thrice weekly.

The writers usually will start with a few excellent comics that they hammered out over a long period of time. After they hit comic 10 or so, they run out of these ideas and have to start making things up as they go along. This is wearying for people with other things that they need to be doing, so they might slow down the updates, or simply stop them altogether. I believe I set the bar at 50 comics for the magical “hump”, where a person will not easily give up, simply because s/he has invested so much time and effort into the comic.

So, we’ll see where Critical Miss ends up. I think that we’ll know definitively by the time that I learn to type “critical” without having to fix the spelling.